NEW YORK, May 17, 2017 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — “Unproven marketing and communications impact is a material business risk to growth and profitability that C-suites and boards of directors must address,” said technology industry leader and public company director Tom Schodorf, who has joined Proof as a senior advisor and C-suite evangelist.

“Great marketing is extremely valuable grease on the wheel of sales performance. It helps a company sell more products to more customers, and to close those deals faster, than any sales organization could manage to do by itself,” said Schodorf.

“But when that marketing impact can’t be proven, it means a lot of uncertainty, volatility and material risk for the company, particularly in the area of opportunity cost. In the end, the C-suite needs to ask the same questions they ask about everything in business: are we investing too much or too little in marketing? How do we know? If we cut, what will we lose? If we increase spend, what do we gain? And very importantly, how long will it take to see the positive or negative impacts? These are the questions that Proof answers.”

Proof is the first business impact assurance (BIA) software in the world to enable marketers and communicators to manage performance data as well as compute and validate their business impact through secure collaboration among internal and external entities, including agencies and other external organizations.

Schodorf joins Proof following a distinguished career leading global sales and operations at BMC Software and Splunk. Currently, he serves as a strategic advisor with global private equity firm Warburg Pincus and as a board member for high-growth companies including cybersecurity leader Rapid7 and software-defined-network company LiveAction. He is responsible for helping boards of directors and executive management teams to hold functional departments like marketing and communications as accountable for their business impact as any other part of a company.

“In 2015, companies spent almost $1.8 trillion globally on marketing, according to the latest CMO Council numbers,” said Schodorf. “Marketing is often one of the most expensive investments many companies make, and it is one of the most important parts of a successful company’s growth, profitability and acceleration. When that business impact cannot be proven, the opportunity cost for marketing dollars also can be very high relative to other areas of company investment. While great marketing with proven business impact is a major contributor to a company’s income statement, unproven marketing is essentially an opportunity cost ‘tax’ on growth, profitability and shareholder value. It’s time for business and marketing leaders to address the problem head-on.”

Mark Stouse, founder and CEO of Proof, added, “Many companies are negatively affected by an unhealthy oscillation in their marketing spend. This happens mainly because most marketing and communications teams cannot prove their business impact. This cycle of ‘fund and de-fund’ moves back and forth between the decision to commit more money to marketing, followed several quarters later by substantial cuts to marketing spend. This inconsistency results in a great deal of wasted money, regrettable talent losses and lost market momentum. The analytics are very clear – it is much better to consistently invest somewhat smaller amounts in great marketing than it is to cycle through ‘boom and bust’ marketing budgets. That both hurts company performance and harms shareholder value. We are seeing significant interest from private equity firms who want to help their portfolio companies improve and optimize in this crucial area.”

C-suite frustration with unproven marketing impact continues to grow. In 2016, a record number of Fortune 1000 CMOs were fired, and CMO tenure across the Fortune 1000 collapsed to 18-22 months. The primary driver of CMO job loss is a failure to demonstrate business impact and to justify very large marketing budgets, according to a CMO Council survey of executives.

“Proof enables marketers to validate their business impact,” Tom Bishop, Proof co-founder and chief technology officer, said. “Proof computes business impact as well as how long it takes for that impact to be felt in the areas of company performance that the C-suite cares about. When marketers and communicators can see how their previous strategies have worked – or not worked – they are empowered to adjust their future plans and increase the likelihood of future success and business value.”

Over the past decade, the individuals that founded Proof have collaborated with 600+ business leaders to create a powerful, award-winning marketing logic framework; instrumentation for that framework; a powerful computational engine; and now a SaaS platform leveraging machine learning and pattern recognition. Launched in December 2016, Proof counts top agencies and companies, including Fortune 100 corporations, among its growing roster of customers. For more information, please visit www.proofanalytics.ai.

Proof is the first analytics software platform in the world to allow marketers and communicators to collaborate across organizational lines in order to compute and validate their business impact. Visit proofanalytics.ai or reach out @proofanalytics for more information. #ProveIt2017 #proCMO #proCCO #proCFO #proBiz #proAgency